By now, the entire world has heard about the celebrity nude photo hack. Images of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and a few others were leaked first on 4Chan (the worst place to ever exist), and spread further on Reddit. It’s believed that this happened through the iCloud, and points to why you need to secure your iCloud account.
I’m not about to go on a bashing spree and participate in victim blaming, not in the sense that they shouldn’t have taken the photos as I believe anyone is free to take any picture of themselves that they want, but I am going to call bullsh!t on the fact that the stars in some way are not to blame for the hack if it was not accomplished by some sort of brute force program.
It is more likely that traditional hacking methods, phishing scams and man in the middle attacks are common, were used. If this is the case, then the stars are some what culpable for their online habits. Ignorance of how to behave online is a poor excuse, here is how you can protect and secure your iCloud account.
How to secure your iCloud account
I know that this is very obvious, but if you truly have information/photos that you don’t want stolen from iCloud, don’t put them there. Don’t take nude pictures in a digital format. Do you want to know why people won’t find nude photos of Marcus Habert online? Because I keep my nude photos on a camera that never connects to the Internet!
To start, I’m going to look at better security measures via tech. These should be used at all times, not just to secure your iCloud account.
The second method is going to stop these types of attacks with better passwords, and will help you against:
- Phishing
- Spyware on your computer
- Your computer/cellphone physically being stolen
They can not stop a brute force hack on a specific account, but they can stop it from having multiple accounts breached if the brute force hack gets at one of your account passwords.
Secure your iCloud account with better tech
You can secure your iCloud account simply by using better tech and better software. A VPN service will protect your account from hacks via man in the middle or fake wifi attacks. This is an easy hack for anyone to do, and can steal your iCloud account password as easily as looking over your shoulder. Perhaps even easier as you’d notice someone standing there!
The second method looks at real world thefts of personal property. This is where you’ll want encryption on your sensitive data (read under nude photos). Mac OSX and Windows support encryption of folders, or the whole disk. This enable them to stop someone from physically taking your device and just turning your computer on to steal your stuff, including your iCloud password.
Secure your iCloud Account with better passwords
The main issue here, likely, is a password being stolen in order to gain access to an iCloud account. Now, you can have one password stolen and not have it mean much more than that one account being hacked.
If you’re completely negligent and use the same password all over the Internet, that one password being stolen could be the end of your online life!
Here’s how you can secure your iCloud Account with better passwords:
Use a different password for each website that needs one. Try a password storing tool so that you only have to remember the password for it, rather than dozens of passwords.- Look into whether Yubikey can help you, it works by generating a password for a day on a USB stick.
- Putting all of your passwords into a PDF file with a name that isn’t “All my Passwords” is another way of going about storing your password if you’re leery of using online tools.
- Remember to change your passwords at least once a year. Often, passwords are stolen and not used as they are more often traded as a form of currency until someone comes along wanting to try them out. If your password has been changed in the meantime, you’re not going to be hacked.
You can secure your iCloud account easily if you invest a little bit of time in tech, like a good
Feature image via everything possible / Shutterstock